Nostalgia - Kostas Karyotakis

From the depth of good times
our loves greet us bitterly

You’re not in love, you say, and you don’t remember.
And if your heart has filled and you shed the tears
that you couldn’t shed like you did at first,
you’re not in love and you don’t remember, even though you cry.

Suddenly you’ll see two blue eyes
- how long it’s been! - that you caressed one night;
as though inside yourself you hear
an old unhappiness stirring and waking up.

These memories of time past
will begin their danse macabre;
and like then, your bitter tear will
well up on your eyelid and fall.

The eyes suspended - pale suns -
the light that thaws the frozen heart,
the dead loves that begin to stir,
the old sorrows that again ignite. . .

---

Kostas Karyotakis (1896 - 1928)  Greece